Exclusive: Some teachers say MPS make-up class guidelines not followed

Oct. 5, 2012 11:55 PM

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At the start of a school day last March, Tade Smiley walked into her classroom at Robert E. Lee High School and discovered her students were missing.

This was a first for Smiley, who had been a teacher in the Montgomery Public School system for more than 45 years at that point, and she went looking for answers. For two full school days Smiley tried to get someone to tell her what was going on, why suddenly she was in an empty room.

“I was left sitting there by myself with a bunch of computers, and so were the other teachers who were doing what I was doing,” said Smiley, who retired from MPS in 2005 but continued to work in some capacity at Lee for the next six years. “I had no clue what was happening. We sat there for two days and got paid for (doing) nothing.”

Smiley said she and three other teachers were serving in roles known as “facilitators.” Essentially, they were the in-room teachers for online classes. The majority of Smiley’s students on a daily basis were in her computer lab to take part in online credit/grade recovery-classes in order to make up work that would allow them to pass all or part of a class they had previously failed. The rest of her students were enrolled in courses, such as advanced foreign language, that weren’t offered at Lee.

On the third morning with no students in her class, Smiley said she and the other facilitators received word from Lee principal Lorenza Pharrams. Without notice, Smiley said, Pharrams was firing Smiley and another facilitator and making drastic changes to the credit and grade recovery courses at Lee.

Quick makeup

Credit and grade-recovery courses, a process available to be used in school districts statewide, have been targets of teacher complaints across the country. Some teachers say they believe the courses, which allow students to make up entire semesters of work in just weeks in some cases, undermine their efforts and are a way to move students through the system and meet arbitrary goals than a way to actually teach the students.

The recovery courses divide a class into sections to be made up. For example, a math class could be divided into portions dealing with multiplication tables, long division and subtraction. If a student fails, it’s often determined that he or she failed only one portion, so that one portion is all that has to be made up in the credit-recovery courses. Therefore, a failing semester grade can be brought up in only a matter of weeks in a recovery class.

A teacher who has taught several recovery courses at an MPS school over the last year, but who declined to be identified for this story because he said he fears for his job, said the recovery courses, when conducted properly, worked well, but that some MPS schools had cut corners and ignored state guidelines.

“It just became a way to pass a kid along without wasting classroom space on them,” the teacher said.

The Alabama Department of Education adopted broad standards for credit-recovery courses in 2008, but generally allows local school boards to determine the specific guidelines. According to a brochure uploaded to the Internet by Sidney Lanier High School in 2010, MPS has strict guidelines in place for its courses.

Those guidelines require students to make at least a grade of 40 in the class they failed, mandate a screening process to determine if the student will take the recovery course seriously, require a certified and highly qualified teacher teach the course and limit absences to three excused. In addition, it limits the grade that can be recovered for the course to a 70 or below and mandates that all recovery courses be computer-based.

Guidelines skirted

Some teachers contend those guidelines are often not being followed, and lax oversight is allowing for students to cheat on a large scale.

“They’re (MPS) lying about how they’re doing the credit recovery — it’s not following state guidelines,” said Tracy Blackmon, who has taught science courses at Jeff Davis for 23 years. “They’re letting the kids get away with anything. And they’re not learning the material.”

Blackmon said that in the 2010-11 school year, Jeff Davis started offering grade-recovery courses that included a Saturday school that wasn’t computer-based.

Blackmon said the classes used actual tests from the classes that students failed, and that she refused to provide the credit-recovery instructor with an answer key for the tests from her classes, ensuring that Blackmon would grade those tests.

“I didn’t trust them to do it,” she said. “It was extra work, but I wanted to do it.”

While grading a test in an anatomy and physiology recovery course, Blackmon said she discovered that most of the class had cheated on a test. Two students’ answers to the discussion questions were nearly identical and most of the students in the class had the same answers on the multiple-choice portion of the test. So, Blackmon gave the students zeroes.

“(School officials) didn’t like that at all,” she said. “I had (assistant superintendent) Lewis Washington telling me that just because they had the same answers didn’t necessarily mean they cheated. He told me to give them a passing grade. I refused.”

Blackmon said at that point Washington told her she was being insubordinate and he placed her on administrative leave.

“He told me to go to the Central Office and see (human resource manager) Jason Lowe to get some paperwork,” Blackmon said. “I went up there, but (Lowe) didn’t know I was coming and refused to see me. So, I went home.”

Numerous attempts to reach Washington over the last several weeks at his home and on his cellphone were unsuccessful and several messages left for him were not returned.

Blackmon hired an attorney to fight the suspension and was reinstated. She said she was removed from being a department head, but after her attorney wrote a letter threatening to sue the system, she was allowed to maintain her salary.

The Montgomery Advertiser asked MPS officials on Wednesday to view any documents relating to Blackmon’s disciplinary action. MPS spokesperson Tom Salter, in an email, said he would check into that request, but the request had not been honored or denied by Friday afternoon.

Changes at Lee

Several teachers who taught at Lee during the 2011-12 school year said the credit-recovery courses changed dramatically at that school the day principal Pharrams fired Smiley. At that point, teachers say, recovery students who had been enrolled in online-only recovery courses, through the Access system, were transferred into courses with in-room teachers.

“They were not successful,” said Pharrams of the online credit-recovery courses. “The ... lack of ability to grasp the concepts — basically it was felt that continuing, when you can see what is currently happening is not beneficial to the child, we felt those students needed someone there on campus.”

The number of students that action affected is in dispute.

Pharrams said only a small number of students had been moved. But several teachers at the school said it was a number closer to 100 students, or roughly half of the 206 recovery-enrolled students.

“I’m not sure how many were in (the Access courses), but I wouldn’t call them ‘a small number’,” Smiley said.

Also at issue is when the move occurred.

Pharrams was emphatic that the move occurred within the first month of the second semester of last school year, and said it “absolutely” didn’t occur in March, as teachers at Lee claim.

However, eight teachers and a student who took one of the courses, Tommy Youngblood, all claim the move occurred in March. Additionally, an email from registrar Tina Fleming that was sent in mid-March to all teachers at Lee informed the faculty that “many students will be receiving new schedules today.”

“That change occurred just before the second nine weeks (of the second semester), because those students had one week of grades in the new classes,” said a teacher familiar with the changeover. “And that’s the only grades they got.”

Four teachers with knowledge of the grading process for recovery students said those students who were moved from online courses to classrooms had their grades prior to the move expunged from the system. The teachers say that meant some of those students were able to make up an entire year’s worth of class work in just over one nine-week period.

“I’ve had several students transfer into my class in the middle of a grading period before, and every time, when I go into the online gradebook, they’re in there with all their prior grades,” a teacher with more than 10 years of experience within MPS schools said. “These kids did not. There was nothing there for them.”

Asked about the accusation that previous grades were wiped from the system, Pharrams said that was impossible.

“A grade can’t just go away in the iNow (computer system),” Pharrams said. “It’s not possible. There is evidence of that grade in there somewhere.”

However, Youngblood, who was taking a senior-level math course, said he believed his grades changed dramatically after the change. He said the new classroom course required work, but that it was “a lot easier,” and that he ended up with a better grade than expected.

“You still had work to do, but it wasn’t as hard as the online stuff,” said Youngblood, who graduated last spring. “I think they did start over with our grades.”

The result

Many teachers feel that the way credit-recovery courses are being handled now — and the way they say students are being pushed through the system — is inappropriate. And they’re not happy.

“I’m ashamed of the product that we’re churning out,” Blackmon said. “I never imagined I’d say that. But we’ve so watered down the curriculum for most courses and then we’ve added in this credit recovery nonsense, and the way they’re doing that, and it’s doing a disservice to these kids. We’re not teaching them. And what are they going to do when they get out in the world?”